This is a story about sticking around.
This is a story about Hesed.
This is a story about muddy knees and chipped fingernails; a story of relentlessness, and reliability, and resilience.
This is a story of soil.
Terrible soil. Not fertile and loamy, but sandy and poor. Soil not worthy of the name. Soil that was more accurately called dirt.
Soil that blew off and made my porch dusty; with gopher holes and weeds and trash that came in after garbage day.
Soil that was not at all amenable to orange trees, or anything else for that matter. Or, so I first thought.
I have a front field. Half an acre of dirt, that has lain fallow since I bought the property 20 years ago. It is often brown and barren, except when it rained and the grass, mixed with mostly weeds, grew.
And grew, and grew. These years I have been alone, sometimes they grew above my head; good for nothing, or, so I thought. So dense and uninviting that even Tikka rejected it. I would try to take care of it myself in fits and starts, but the job was just too damn much for one woman with two full time jobs.
One day, I was at the wooden fence line, staring at what felt like my failure. The worst property on the block. Every time I came up the driveway, I studiously ignored the tangle. Sometimes I would go out to at least pick up the trash from the field, always in shadow, at night, so the neighbors wouldn’t see. That front field was my shame. A metaphor: that nothing good would ever grow; and that what did spring up had no value. Like me.
As I sank deeper, I heard a voice: Teacher.
“Gather the tools,” Teacher said. Teacher, who spent years, decades, making sure her charges had all the things they needed in their desks; scissors; glue; sharp pencils; lined paper; flash cards. And, when they forgot them, a crisp but kind reminder to cheek their backpacks.
Gather the tools. Teacher had no idea what she was asking me to do. The tools were in the workshop, a place I had hardly entered since my husband was gone. To go to the tools, to dust off, and sharpen, and oil and use, meant going into recesses and dark places in that workshop. Meant that I would remember. And meant that I would prepare myself for pain; the pain of that remembering; of trauma, of loss, of despair. To use the tools meant finally acknowledging that it was indeed just me. That no one was going to come and use them to break soil but me. That I had to not just gaze at the field in helpless impotence, but that I had to take responsibility for its health, and for my own.
Getting past the cobwebs and trying to figure out how to use the unfamiliar, because Robert had handled all of it before, was a challenge indeed. I used the wrong tools the wrong way; I got blistered and chapped. Some were dry and cracked and broke at the first effort. I was so discouraged.
“Invest in new,” Teacher advised. New? Was Teacher kidding? I had been living in clench mode ever since Robert left and Teacher was telling me to invest? In things I didn’t even know how to ask for at the garden center; stumbling and fumbling my way through what I needed, and my cart filling up and a shaking hand as I handed over hard earned cash I wasn’t at all sure would be replaced.
Now what? What am I supposed to do with this……this stuff?
“Read the directions. Then follow them.” Such easy advice. But how often do we, do I, actually read the directions before we attempt? For me, not often. Of course I know how to use a cutter, and a blower, and that thing that digs up tumbleweeds. Except that I didn’t. And stopping and reading and checking–and heeding– made the difference.
I remember at church when faced with the big coffee urn. There is a big sign, probably placed by Teacher, that says “Read the directions FIRST.” Welp. I had made coffee before; I didn’t need a tutorial on how to use this one. Which is how I wound up cleaning up brown water and coffee grounds. Then I went into the drawer. And read the directions.
Now with knowledge, I felt more secure. But going at a half acre alone for the few minutes or hours I could spare were not nearly enough. It rained a lot this year; more than usual in San Diego. I would make a small dent, and the weeds would spring right back up. It was Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, again and again and again. I was bruised and sore and tired.
“Ask for help,” Teacher said. “Raise your hand and just ask.”
Ask. Something very hard for me to do. Impossible, really.
If I asked, that meant letting someone up the driveway so they could see the depth of my shame, my not-knowing, my failed efforts. If I asked, someone could ridicule me. Someone would say the job of fixing the tangled failure was just altogether too big. You need to have wobbly knees and the sorest of backs to do the seemingly impossible.
“Ask and watch and learn. Ask and watch and learn.”
And so I did. and Mr. B came with his son and his truck, and made short work of the front field. He held my face in his calloused hands and looked at me with nothing but love and empathy, knowing without my telling him of my struggles. “We will make it beautiful,” he said.
“Together.”
Teacher, with her tea, by the (only seemingly) barren orange tree, smiled.
And so it was. Beautiful. At least not an eyesore. And the orange tree bloomed, and bore the first fruits it had in years.
Later, I told a version of this story to a new friend. A friend who knew of fields. She runs an organic farm, which was news to me, and she had the instructions in her head to make fields fertile again. To make it not only presentable, but producing. Another teacher.
“Mustard greens. We will plant mustard greens!”
Mustard greens have many uses for fallow fields: they hold the topsoil in; they are edible (lucky for me I love greens), and they make beautiful yellow flowers which will please the eye. More importantly, though, they nourish the soil. R. told me to plant and grow, and plow under, plant, grow, plow, for at least two year’s cycles. The soil will be ready to nurture new growth.
But would they grow? I asked.
R looked at me, with kind eyes. Anywhere weeds grow, good growth can happen. That sank deeply into my soul, like so many orange seeds.
It will take awhile, but our newly enriched soil will be able to nurture so many more trees, and other life. This is not a one and done. But the harvest is coming.
Dig deep.
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